Woah, the Madison voice is quite clearly Julia Whelan.
100%, I noticed it immediately.
Apple Books digital narration
161–170 of 244 posts
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious what the economics are here, because getting someone to just read a book can't possibly be that expensive, right? I'm not talking celebrity voice-over work, but just getting anybody with a passable voice to sit down a spend a day or so reading a book into a microphone? Does that really cost that much more than having someone sit down a listen to the whole AI-generated audio book to do QA? And then there's…
You need to take into account that nobody can perfectly read a book first time. I've done a reasonable amount of short-fiction narration for audio magazines, and even with many hours worth of script reading under my belt I still fumble every third or forth sentence. So I need to re-read those, and then I (or somebody else) needs to find those errors and edit them out, replacing with the fixed audio. Then people need…
This was demonstrated vividly when Andy Serkis read The Hobbit unabridged live for charity then did a separate recording as a commercial release. Both were great, but you could see how many minor flaws were in the live recording that would have had to be re-recorded in the commercial version. (I’ve no idea how long it took to record the Lord of the Rings which he did a year later)
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#163I guess I kind of wish they would just offer the AI narration as a feature of Apple ebooks. Such that, if you buy the book, you can have ebooks read to you by your phone. I am really just buying books off audible with the subscription they offer. There are some books (tech books that is) that are offered as audio books and I gobble those up. There are, however, many more epub/digital books that I never buy not becaus…
This should be a feature available for any text document. The existing iOS text-to-speech is almost barely adequate, but not really.
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A long pause between "places" and "wild", to me, signals their dis-association, that "wild" does not link with "places" But that long pause is still way shorter than the pauses at actual periods! Look at the waveform[0]: the ovals are the periods, the rectangle is the pause between "places" and "wild". I guess due to the length of the pauses at the actual periods, my brain automatically discards the possibility of…
Empirical evidence of a pause and its length is not indicative of how the typical listener will interpret it.
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Re: Apple Books digital narration
#165I guess I kind of wish they would just offer the AI narration as a feature of Apple ebooks. Such that, if you buy the book, you can have ebooks read to you by your phone. I am really just buying books off audible with the subscription they offer. There are some books (tech books that is) that are offered as audio books and I gobble those up. There are, however, many more epub/digital books that I never buy not becaus…
I use the iOS Speech Accessibility feature to listen to ebooks and it works great.
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#166I guess I kind of wish they would just offer the AI narration as a feature of Apple ebooks. Such that, if you buy the book, you can have ebooks read to you by your phone. I am really just buying books off audible with the subscription they offer. There are some books (tech books that is) that are offered as audio books and I gobble those up. There are, however, many more epub/digital books that I never buy not becaus…
Amazon at one time tried to add voice reading to Kindle books. Authors were absolutely livid . Audiobooks are a significant income source, and taking that away from authors is going to make authors decline to sell digital books on your platform. Apple is doing this right by making it an author's choice.
I totally see this point — I’m making a separate one for ebooks that aren’t getting purchased because they haven’t been (and probably never will be) narrated by a real human.
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#167The "Helena" sample contains a pretty good test case of this system's ability to guess where emphasis and pauses go: > I know Bill carried within him deep currents of spiritual yearning that he found easiest to express through the beauty he saw in all places wild. (I checked in an online sample of the ebook: there is no punctuation in this sentence.) Unfortunately the AI completely faceplants, placing an enormous pau…
I guess this is more of a case of garbage in - garbage out. The original sentence itself is not well-structured. But people who write like that and don't edit it; won't care of how the AI reads it. I don't feel like this is a product for carefully producing audiobooks, but to create them by the pound, so to speak. I'd say it's a move for the "make your own business through audiobooks" people [1] -- very strange for A…
>But people who write like that and don't edit it; won't care of how the AI reads it.
Now human language, limited as it already is, is to be is to be humbled before machines that humans have also invented. In our inability to create a machine capable of doing cognitively what humans do, we prefer that humans function as if they had been lobotomized, in deference to our crude machines.
We have built god, and god is stupid, and we bow before him because god has been created, once again, in the image of man.
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#168The "Helena" sample contains a pretty good test case of this system's ability to guess where emphasis and pauses go: > I know Bill carried within him deep currents of spiritual yearning that he found easiest to express through the beauty he saw in all places wild. (I checked in an online sample of the ebook: there is no punctuation in this sentence.) Unfortunately the AI completely faceplants, placing an enormous pau…
> Unfortunately the AI completely faceplants, placing an enormous pause right in the middle of the phrase "all places wild". It actually changes the meaning of the text, making it sound more like "...the beauty he saw in all places. Wild!" I disagree for 2 reasons: 1. There's a perfectly fine reason to put a pause between "places" and "wild": to put emphasis on "wild". Bill doesn't see beauty in all places, but speci…
Maybe this is just me, but I find it really unnatural to pause in the middle of a short phrase like "all things wild". I'd emphasize "wild" by putting stress on it, not by pausing.
But this excerpt is the end of a paragraph that begins with "Bill loved and found solace in nature." and describes taking walks and looking at the moon. This doesn't support emphasizing "wild" because the author has already established that information; the important part of the sentence is "deep spiritual yearning", or maybe "easiest to express", since the author then goes on to discuss how, after he died, Bill expressed himself from beyond the grave in other ways.
I could kind of understand the AI not quite getting the emphasis right, since that's a judgement call that requires a lot of context from the rest of the book. But breaking up "all places wild" like the sample does suggests that it doesn't understand the basic grammar of the sentence.
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#169Will we see this level of voice synthesis in the public domain? Maybe I am out of touch but I found those examples very impressive - more impressive than the jobs vs rogan demo a few months back. But I am also saddened at a future where all this is locked up in corporate hands - obviously there is money needed and (licensed) data needed too which Apple can get at. Honestly I would rather eschew the ethics of it and j…
This is already easily achievable on consumer hardware, you can train something like Tacotron 2 + WaveRNN on your own computer to achieve similar, if not better results. Check out this repo: https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS You can also clone someone's voice by finetuning a pretrained LJSpeech model and training a vocoder from scratch, I've had great success with as little as 15 minutes of speech.
It really isn't though. The level of fidelity that Apple is demonstrating in those samples is very impressive. You can generate fine voices with little work using repos like that one, but to get to the level Apple has takes a lot of work.
EDIT: "fine voices" not "find voices"
Re: Apple Books digital narration
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the purposes of this discussion, this is a distinction without a difference. “Black voice” is a term of art, meant to convey that the voices in question were trained on features commonly associated with African American English. The voices in the example are US English voices. Race, ethnicity, accent, language — all of these are complex topics with plenty of nuances. Short of writing a dissertation, no simple rep…
This answer might have ben reasonable if US was the only place on earth. When I hear Giannis Antetokoumpo speak english for example he sounds exactly like a Spanish/Greek person speaking English even though the native population of these places is white.
The US is Apple’s primary market and the focus of this campaign.